The Effect Of Empowering Leadership On Employee’s Innovation Behavior:the Effect Of Psychological Availability And Perceived Organizational Support

With the rapid development of economic globalization, the competition is becoming more and more intense, which has brought a severe test for the organization, so, continuous innovation ability is very important to the organization’s survival. Employees’innovation is the most basic unit and necessary condition of organizational innovation. Therefore, the research of the formation mechanism of employees’ innovative behavior has became widespread concern in the Industry research and academic research.In organization, Leaders was considered to be one of the important situational factors which affect innovative behavior, because they have a lot of resources and influence.A lot of studies have discussed the relationship between leadership and employees’innovative behavior, but these studies mainly focused on the impact of leaders’supportive behaviors and leadership-members relationship on employees’innovative behavior. Until recent years, scholars began to explore the influence of a wider range of leadership behavior theory on innovative behavior, such as transformational leadership and paternalistic leadership, etc. However, these studies ignored the research of empowering leadership. So far, only a small of research discussed the mechanism between empowering leadership and innovative behavior. So, the complicated relationship between empowering leadership and innovative behavior remains to be further clarified.Based on the conservation of resource theory, this study constructed a research model in which empowering leadership influences innovative behavior, with psychological availability as a mediator and perceived organizational supportas a moderator, and proposed the hypothesis.Then, we made a leader-subordinate paired questionnaire survey to collect data.Next, we used spss19.0 and amos 17.0 statistical software to analyse 281 paired questionnaire and test the hypotheses. According to the data analysis, the results showed that 1) empowering leadership was positively related to innovative behavior; 2) empowering leadership was positively related to followers’ psychological availability; 3) psychological availability was positively related to followers’ innovative behavior; 4) psychological availability partially mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and followers’ innovative behavior;5)the perceived organizational support moderated the relationship between psychological availability and followers’innovative behavior, that is, the higher perceived organizational support, the stronger the relationship;6) perceived organizational suppor moderated the mediated relationship through psychological availability, that is, the higher perceived organizational support, the stronger the mediated relationship;7) idea generation was positively related to idea application; 8) the perceived organizational support moderated the relationship between idea generation and idea application.In terms of practical implications, organizations not only need to encourage leaders to implement more empowering leadership behaviors in their daily work, which giving employees more job autonomy and the chance of participation in decision-making, so that employees’ psychological availability can be improved, but also need to give employees more support and care, so that they perceived more organizational support, thus encouraging them to participate in the innovative work, to show more innovative behavior.